Sri Lanka’s ruling Rajapaksa administration will present its maiden Budget on Tuesday, amid a relentless second wave of COVID-19 that hit the island nation last month. Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, also the Minister of Finance, will unveil the Budget for the year 2021 in Parliament, and the final vote — after its third reading — is scheduled on December 10.

The Budget assumes significance, coming amid a devastating global pandemic. Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves are under enormous strain in the wake of mounting external debt — the government recently repaid $4.2 billion for this year — while its export and tourism sectors, and worker remittances from abroad, have been severely impacted. The budget comes a year after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa rose to power, promising his voters development and prosperity, and at a time when analysts have warned of a GDP contraction of possibly up to 10%, a low that the country did not experience even during its civil war years.

Meanwhile, the plight of Sri Lanka’s working people has come to the fore.

Not only because of the cluster that broke out at a garment factory near Colombo last month, putting the lives and jobs of several thousand workers at risk, but also because the threat of joblessness looms larger than before. Worker organisations are desperately looking for some respite in the budget, to help them cope.

According to Anton Marcus, joint secretary, Free Trade Zones and General Services Employees Union — representing workers from most of Sri Lanka’s garment factories — catering to the export market and earning precious foreign exchange — some 20,000 workers of the 300,000 employed companies affiliated to Sri Lanka’s Board of Investment have already lost their jobs. “There is a fear of even higher rates of joblessness in the coming months. So about 10 major unions have got together and submitted a proposal for an unemployment benefit insurance scheme. The budget will tell us if the government has taken it into consideration,” he told The Hindu.